Many Christian churches hold regular communion services in which small portions of bread and small cups filled with juice or wine are served. The cups predominantly used for these services have tapered sides with the bottom of the cups having a smaller diameter than the top, thereby facilitating a simple means by which the congregation can dispense of the cups after they have drunk the contents. Typically, each individual dispenses their cup by placing it in one of several, generally vertical, holes that pass through one or more horizontal members affixed to the backs of the church pews. After the service, someone retrieves the empty cups.
Prior to the proliferation of plastic, glass was the dominant material out of which communion cups were made. To avoid the laborious and time consuming task of hand washing numerous small cups following a communion service, many congregations have now use plastic cups that are simply thrown away after the service. While plastic cups eliminate the laborious task of hand washing, for some people plastic cups tend to cheapen communion services. Additionally, throwaway plastic is blatantly unfriendly towards the environment. Many people associate a disregard for the environment with sinfulness, and therefore find considerable objection to using throw away plastic cups for a communion service. Members of a church congregation who find objection to plastic communion cups are often those who volunteer to hand wash the glass cups.
While plastic has become very prevalent, so have automatic dishwashers. Many church congregations today have dishwashers at their place of worship, or have access to a dishwasher via members of the congregation. The current invention is sized and equipped to perform in every commercially available dishwasher currently known to the inventor. In addition to facilitating fast and easy washing of glass cups, the current invention can also be used as a storage rack, and as a serving tray. By using the current invention in all of its capacities, even less handling of the individual cups is required than is required when using disposable cups.
There are other known devices that hold drinking cups and other small items for use in automatic dishwashers. However, none of these devices are well adapted to being set into the varying sizes and configurations of wire racks found in virtually all dishwasher racks intended for residential use. These devices offer no provisions for safely mounting them to a wire form dishwasher rack such that the coating on the wires of the racks would not be damaged in the process. Previous devices are also significantly more costly to produce in small quantities due to the increased number of operations and types of equipment required to produce wire formed objects, and due to the initial costs of the molds that are required for injection type molding of multiple parts. Delaire presents a device made from extruded parts which offer a cost effective means of production, however, this device as presented is not adapted for washing purposes and certainly no suggestion is apparent for how such a device might be installed into a variety of dishwasher racks without harming the coatings on the wires, especially at the tip ends of wires which are found in most automatic dishwasher racks. There are also known devices specifically for washing communion cups in a vat of soapy water, where the washer person maintains physical control over the device during the washing.